I hate Zuck as much as the next geek, but preserving human rights is a governmental-scale responsibility, not an issue we leave up to every random company to do their own due diligence (or we'd have none).

It's great Wyden and Markey are taking an interest in this, but the issue is far bigger than one major brand of spy-glasses; there are dozens of brands of similar glasses that don't even pretend to try to protect privacy; and moving beyond that specific form factor, there are thousands of styles of spy cameras available to any random Joe for under $100 (many in the $20-$30 range!) right from Amazon. This isn't even trying to squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube - This is drowning in a vat of Colgate while pissing and moaning over a stray blob of Crest.

Well, for things headed out, power supplies are the crucial problem. For things in the inner solar system, solar storms are irregular, but *will* happen. So I'm not really convinced by this test for anything but LEO (as those are temporary anyway).

That said, as long as it's intended for "special missions" it's reasonable. But AI is power hungry compared to fixed electronics, so that's going to be a continuing problem.

The problem with testing radiation hardness that way is that solar storms are quite erratic and severe ones are infrequent...but definitely not absent.

This test may work for things intended for low Earth orbit, as those are temporary anyway, but I don't think it's going to validate other uses. A better choice would be to send something to orbit Jupiter, where harsh radiation challenges are predictably present.

Two engineers (one of whom is a stuffed shirt being thrown a bone post-acquisition) are going to rewrite Cisco's legacy code using AI and an unlimited budget.

I'm sorry, can even the most delusional pro-AI executive out there seriously say that with a straight face? This just plain fails the sniff test - Are they establishing a scapegoat for an already-failing project? Honoring some contractual landmine EZDubs managed to sneak in? Straight-up insurance fraud?

If this is exactly what it looks like at face value, excuse me while I go short Cisco stock.

Headline from 1845.

While true, Idi Amin, e.g., was not white.

OK. That puts them in the same basket as Flock.

What does it matter whether or not they're white? I've seen examples from Asia and Africa that were worse.

I'd put him as one of the top 3 or 4, or at least one of the top 10, because of the power of his position, not because he's intrinsically the worst.

Well, if all cars do the same thing, you have a good point. I haven't looked in the last decade, but the last time I did there were lots of alternatives. I admit many posts over the months have been saying that this isn't true any longer...or that this is why they only drive (some model) used car.

But it's still not as bad as Flock (et al.), which doesn't even ask for permission.

But I believe that Lexis is only selling the data of those that have agreed to have their data sold, even if they didn't realize it.

It may not stop tracking, but it lets you do the search for something without losing your place.

Claiming that "Most psychology experiments are not replicated" is both true and irrelevant. Most psychology experiments are done to satisfy arbitrary rules. When I took a psych class, I had to sign up for, I think, one experiment per week. None of them were either replicated or significant.

There *are* psychology experiments that are replicated. Some survive replication, some don't. The ones that aren't replicated aren't important...and there are lots of experiments in other sciences that aren't replicated unless there's a good reason. Many are so expensive that replication is done only if it appears to be needed. (The experiment was done and it agrees with theory. OK.)

Actually those two stances are NOT incompatible. I'm not sure they're both true, but they might well be.

Finding a code exploit is a task with an easily validated result. That's where AI is best.
Writing code that doesn't have exploits doesn't have a easy check. So AI is not as good there.

You could use a harness to check for exploits after you wrote the code, but that increases both time and cost, and isn't guaranteed to find all the exploits. (People and AIs think differently, and don't recognize all the same patterns.)

This will probably change. AIs have "jagged competence", but the areas that they are weak have been getting stronger. For now, however (and as I understand it) there are still many areas where humans are more competent than publicly available AIs.

It's quite plausible that sometime next year Yang's reported claims will be appropriate. OTOH, that would imply massive other changes, also. And it's also possible that the claims will still be exaggerated.

Agreed. If you don't know what you're doing it's hard to even ask for the right thing or know what's possible. For example: I'm currently developing a system that uses a local AI to help debug internal issues. The initial incarnations of it were very slow to start up each command; clearly, it wasn't doing proper KV caching and was having to prefill every turn; it required patches on the llama.cpp fork and our API wrapper, and also adjusting the system prompt to keep variable content at the end. But if you have no idea about KV caching issues, how do you even know something is wrong with the backend, let alone what to tell the AI to fix? You'll end up deciding you need to upgrade the GPU instead.

(That said: "lovingly handcrafted" code is a hilarious phrase that should give any developer who's ever worked on a big corporate software project the giggles, and also, these software devs are clearly people angry at knowing they're going to be let go looking for revenge by badmouthing their boss to the press)